 What's going on guys, it's Yuval here and in today's video I want to talk about three major color grading mistakes that beginners always make and I'm also going to show you how to fix them So before we jump in I just want to let you guys know that we have a giveaway at the end of this video So make sure you stick around but now let's jump in so the first mistake I see a lot of people make is that they don't prep their footage correctly And what I mean by that is only two things first one is not balancing the image correctly And the second one is not doing the right color space conversion for your footage or doing it the wrong way So I'm going to show you the right way to do these two things and also what you should avoid so we have here a log footage, which is Probably what most of you will be working with most of the time and a classic beginner mistake would be to just jump right in And start working on this image, you know, maybe try to lift up the gain Bring back the shadows, you know Just try to like stretch the image. Maybe make something like that Then go on make another node or start giving it some kind of a look and so on and you know just basically jumping right in without doing any prep work and That is not the right way to go because you're setting yourself up for failure Essentially because you didn't balance the image correctly before you actually started grading So before we go in and create a look you have to make sure that our image is Balanced in terms of the white balance and tint and then also converted to rex 709 in a clean Conversion and that way you have a good starting point so you can go on and create whatever look you're trying to create But you have to get a base start So I'm gonna show you how to do it the right way I'm going to delete this node and we're going to start from the beginning and by the way for this footage I kind of mess with the colors a little bit just to get the white balance off so I can show you how to correct it But let's assume that this is how the footage was actually shot So for this first node, I'm going to call it white balance and then I'm going to create a new node and This one is where I'm going to do my conversion to rex 709 and to make it good to break 709 conversion You have to know the camera that was used to capture the footage So in this instance, I know that this was shot on red So there's two ways to do this conversion one is using Technical conversion lot that you can find over here in the vinci for free. You can see we have this platform red and That's one way to do it But I'm gonna do it with the color space transform which I feel usually works Better for me. So I'm going to grab that under there and then I'm going to for the input color space I know this was shot on red. So I'm going to go For red video gamut RGB and in the input gamma, I'm gonna go for red log 3g10 then go for rex 709 and then in the tone mapping. I usually like to go for luminance mapping and This is looking very off and that's because the image is not balanced So let's just quickly call this rex 709 and then on the first node I'm going to Go with my tint Bring it back That's already looking much better Now the image is still very warm. So let's cool it off And that's looking pretty balanced. You can see the image is now clean It just looks right and we have a great starting points to go on and create Whatever look we want from now on but you have to make that first Conversion that balance just to get the image into that baseline the base point where you can walk off And here's another quick tip for the white balance. Maybe if you can't really get it right Try to go with this Eyedropper tool here and it's going to auto balance and what you need to do is choose a point in the image That should be white. So I'm going to go for these things here and There you go want to click and you have a great white balanced image So now let's move on to the second Mistake that I see a lot of beginners make and that is not really giving enough attention To the skin if your skin is not looking right, then the whole look just throws you off It looks amateurish. It looks bad. So let's look at a quick example of what I mean So let's say I've done your conversion and white balance correctly and then you go on Create a new node and You want to start applying a look to the image. So let's quickly do that. Let's say we want to go for maybe something like that So let's just say that that's the look I was trying to create here So it looks nice, but it looks pretty amateurish and that's mainly Because the skin is looking bad. It's not the right tone. So now I'm going to show you how to fix that so what we can do is go up to our spectroscope over here and you can see we have this skin tone Line indicator and if you can't see that then you have to go into here and then enable show skin tone indicator and This line basically indicates where the skin tone should be now That's not a you know must follow 100% of the time kind of thing But most of the time probably you should follow this line usually will get you good results So that's what we're going to do now and we're going to create a new parallel node So I just want this correction for the skin to be on a separate node So I can control it I can turn it on and off and see what I've done and I can later on Tweak it so I don't want to do it on the same node as I did the look adjustment So that's also a mistake to avoid. I'm trying to do all your corrections in one node And also doing too many nodes is also not the best try to think about what you might want to change later But you might need more control with so that's an example here with the skin tone I definitely want to do it on a separate node So there's two ways to go about this the first one can be just qualifying and keying out the skin and the second Which might not always work, but it can work in some cases He is using the u versus curves here. So I'm going to go with that first. Let's try it out We have u versus u and Now I'm going to just click on a point here on our skin And you can see it created a point for us on the curve and that means this is where the skin tone lies So let's start moving that around and see what we get So you can see as I move this around obviously we can see it with our eyes But then also when we look at the vectorscope we can see this thing Moving along the line and as I get farther from the line We can see it obviously doesn't look very good So I'm going to try and park it on a place that looks good Maybe Something like that and let's do a quick before and after So you can see how that looks way better and it really helps sell the look It now looks more natural and it doesn't look as bad as it did before And this method with the u versus u is sometimes nice because it's really quick and it's easier The thing is you have less control over this because if I wanted to add specific colors Only to the skin I can't really do it with the u versus u because I can only shift around That u I cannot add new things So let's just look at the other way to do this So I'm going to delete this node and now I'm just going to create a layer mixer node And the shortcut for that would be alt l if you're on windows and sometimes I do this on a parallel node But let's try it with the mixer node and how this layer mixer node Works without getting too deep into this subject on this video But essentially it's just taking information from this node over here So you can see if I turn this off we have the look And I want to affect the skin that's like the way it was over here On the rex 709 conversion So that's what happens with the layer node if you create a parallel node And it's going to kind of do some kind of a blend some kind of a mix between these two nodes So sometimes I do this with the Parallel node, but for this time I'm going to go with the layer mixer You can just try this out for yourself and kind of see what you like best It also depends on the project. Let's move on with this So now obviously This is just pretty much the leading everything that we did with the look That's because we have to actually select just the skin so that we only have that So I'm going to go into the qualifier over here And I'm going to Select skin And then just so I can see what I'm doing going to Press here on this highlight feature And now you can see what we're grabbing. Let's de-noise it a little bit Give it some blur And usually I would spend Obviously more time getting the perfect key And you should definitely do that But just for the sake of this tutorial, let's assume that this is my Final clean key. So I'm going to take off the highlights You can see that basically we masked out the skin From this look node. So this is the same skin as we had in the rex 709 node that we have here So if I turn all of these off Turn them back on You can see the look is pretty much only Done on the background now and now my skin looks better But there's just something weird Because it's not the blending right because we did a lot of things with the look adjustment, but then We're just reverting the skin back into the rex 709 Which doesn't really blend well. So what I usually do is I go to my key Then I just bring down this gain And you can see how that starts to kind of blend things in If it's sitting at zero Basically, it means it's not showing at all So let's try to kind of get it right where we want it to be Maybe something like that Looks kind of nice. So let's do a quick before and after This doesn't look good skin looks green and blue just looks off And then we were bringing the skin back and that's looking way better And now that we have the skin selected we could actually even Go into the log wheels maybe and you know, we could maybe add some reds in there So basically with this technique of separating the skin Compared to the first way that I showed you we have way more control with this one So the next big mistake that I see a lot of beginners make and this is one that I've been Making for the longest time when I was just starting out with grading and this is one of the Like bigger ones I would say and that is not having clean blacks So what I mean by that is if we look at the black areas on the image on the shadows You can see they have a very strong tint in this image. They look green Kind of like bluish and they're also very lifted We can see this by looking at the scopes over here on the right side You can see that the shadows are pretty lifted and then also the red is quite down Which means we have a lot of blues in there Then the blues are kind of down. It's just not looking right I'm not on the scope and not with our eyes and having clean shadows that sit on the right point On the scopes is really critical to having beautiful and clean and professional looking great So the way to fix that is I'm going to create a parallel node using alt p and then first off Like using my log wheels, I'm going to go into the shadows and just start bringing things down Until it kind of hits that zero point So somewhere around there and then we're going to get rid of that Green tint and there's a few ways to do this But that's just the easiest way and the one that I find myself using the most And that's by going to our shadows wheel over here And then pushing in the opposite direction of our tint. So we have kind of like a greenish Blueish tint, so I'm going to pull the opposite direction, which is Red or like magenta I'm just going to look at the image While I play with this to get Just the right color and the right amount So maybe something like that looks kind of cool So that's before and this is after and you can see how that really Really helps the grade look a lot cleaner And then if you think we went too far, we can always Bring the entire key Kind of down or we could also I'm just Go back here and like raise the shadows or do whatever But this is looking way better now And you could have some tint in the shadows like that's fine That's something that you can choose to do with your grade But just the like darkest blacks should usually Be clean as a general rule of thumb and With this adjustment we're Affecting a lot of the shadows So if we wanted to only affect The darkest stocks of the image Then what we could do is go into the low range over here And then just kind of control that and you can see If I pull this all the way down to zero, then we're not affecting any of the shadows And as I start pulling this up, we're affecting More and more of the shadows So if we have this quite low, then it's affecting only the darkest parts of the image And as I go up, it's affecting More of the shadows. So this is an important Slider over here the slow range feature. It really helps you control Just the exact tones that we want to be affecting. So that's looking much better. If I go Like zooming into his gloves even you can see how before this looks kind of dull. It's kind of washed out The details are kind of gone. It's a lot of these areas And when I bring this back on, it just gives it A lot more detail. It looks much crispier. It's not washed out And that's really something that a lot of beginners overlook So these are the top color grading mistakes to avoid. I hope you enjoyed this video If you did, please give it a like and consider subscribing for more videos like this one And for today's giveaway, one of you guys could win a free one year upgrade subscription All you have to do to enter is tell us down in the comments below what video would you like for us to make next? But that's all for today and until the next time Stay creative